Apollo 8: The Mission That Changed Everything by Martin W. Sandler (review)

NASA's 1968 Apollo 8 mission had been planned as a preliminary heat in the U.S. vs. USSR race to land a man on the moon. An untried Saturn V rocket was supposed to send lunar landers to the moon for testing. However, news of the Soviets' development of spacecraft suitable for carrying humans to the moon and delays in development of the U.S. lunar lander changed the scope of the mission. Now NASA would send a crew of three into orbit around the moon before the Russians could put their rocket to use. Space-struck readers are doubtless well apprised of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but here Sandler offers them an equally nail-biting true adventure as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders become the first persons to lose communication with their planet, see the Earth from beyond orbit, view the dark side of the Moon, undergo a perilous reentry, and live to tell the tale. Sandler deals equally well with technical and personal narrative threads, explaining the challenges of navigation and reentry and attending to the very different personalities crammed into the tiny command capsule (Anders, the scientist, could hardly tear himself away from the view; Borman, the anti-Russian flyboy, just wanted to get the job done and claim victory). He also pays serious attention to the cultural impact of the mission, whose photographs of Earthrise inspired a fresh way of looking at the home planet and of appreciating its fragility, thus advancing not only the space program but also the ecology movement. Multi-page insets make frequent appearances, impinging on the pacing of the text, but readers will easily settle into flipping past distractions or bookmarking them for a later visit. Source notes, bibliography, and index are included; the extensive photographs will be in color in the bound book. EB